The Depression and Anxiety Support Group

Hello again, and Happy St. Patrick's Day! I can't believe it's been a week since we've spoken. Several times during this week I've wanted to hop online and write you a note, but I didn't have anything to say except that I've missed writing. Well, I'm sure I could have gone on some political or activist-type rant, but that's not what this blog is about. I will only talk about those things as they relate to my disorders. In other words, I won't force my opinions on you, just the feelings they create in me. Sometimes that may require I do some explaining of the problem, but I will never proselytize. You, in return, must never turn my comment section into a political or activist debate, either. Deal? Awesome!

In the last post I said that I would start my posts by talking about things I did the previous week outside of therapy. Well, let me start by telling you what I have been doing every day of every week for the last year-and-a-half or so.

I wake up when I wake up (usually sometime between 6 am and 9 am,) make a cup of coffee, go to the home office and get on the computer to read the news and my Facebook feed. I'll play some computer games and watch some Netflix and wait for my brother's business phone to ring, make some business phone calls for him, get his financial stuff done. (I used to spend time job searching and entering applications, too, but no one ever responded, so why bother?)

Sometime during the afternoon, I go to the kitchen and clean up before cooking dinner for myself and my brother. I eat dinner in front of the computer and then do some more kitchen clean up...if I feel like it.

At 7 pm I move to my bedroom, turn on Netflix and either crochet or play more games on the iPad Grandma gave me. (It was a gift to her, but she didn't like it, so she gave it to me. Does that sound like I'm justifying being on Medicaid and having an iPad? I think it does. I'm just stating a fact, but it sounds like justifying to me. Maybe apologizing for having one? I should talk about that more later.) I used to turn the T.V. off around 9 pm and read, but I haven't felt like reading for a couple months, and that makes me sad. Anyway, my day usually ends between midnight and 3 am. See, I have to stay awake until my eyelids are literally drooping and have a hard time keeping them open. If I don't do this, my brain won't let me go to sleep. (It sucks, but it's been like that for as long as I can remember.)

So, that's a typical day for me. In future posts, I'll just talk about the stuff that doesn't include my usual routine. I think that'll be better all around.

This last week I had dinner with my mom. My dad is a truck driver, so she's alone most of the time. Her brother in Washington state is really sick, and she's having a hard time right now. We live in Colorado, so it's not like she can visit him. It's making her feel really bad, and I thought she would like a little pampering. So, I made dinner for her at her house on Monday, and we watched a movie together. It was a very nice evening, and she seemed to enjoy the movie, too. We watched The Good Dinosaur (I thought it was okay, but I wasn't really all that impressed, which surprises me. I'm a pretty pro-Disney-movie kind of gal.) I then did most of the dishes and went home.

Once I got home, I followed the after 7 pm portion of my previously mentioned schedule, with one addition.  My new schedule, which I just started on Saturday, includes spending about half-an-hour listening to some kind of wordless, or non-English speaking, soothing music in corpse pose right before I try to fall asleep. Why wordless or non-English speaking you ask? Because if I can understand the words, I focus on them instead of on my breathing and relaxing my body. Next question: Has it been working? I don't know. The first two days seemed good. I woke up the next morning feeling like I had actually slept instead of like I had spent the night running. But that hasn't been the case for the last 3 mornings. I'll keep trying, of course, but I find that I'm having a really hard time making my mind go quiet. I'll be focused on my breathing, in...out...in...out, then a random thought will pop in screw it all up. Soooo, then I'll try harder to concentrate on the breathing and my upper body will tense up. I noticed that I'll lay there breathing in and out for several minutes before I realize that my body is not relaxed. Soooo, then I'll start over. Yeah, corpse pose is turning out to be more difficult than I thought. Maybe the next pose will help. I think I'll see if my knees can handle the child's pose.

I'll let you know next week. (BTW-I'm not going to replace the corpse pose with child's pose, I'm going to do both. The goal is to create a daily relaxation routine utilizing several poses.)

And now on to my first group therapy session. Wow. Not what I expected. What did I expect, you ask? Well, I expected to be with a group of people who wanted to get better, like me. to be fair, there were people in the group like that, but there were a few who gave me the feeling that the only reason they were there was because the court said they had to be there. Since it's a very small group, those few equaled almost half the group.  It scared me a little. When people are somewhere they don't want to be, they're more likely to be judgmental and non-helpful. Also, it seemed like those same people resented the new therapist leading the group. (While we were in the waiting room, they were very vocal with each other about how much they disliked her.) Perhaps they were just upset because the previous therapist left them, and they were taking it out on the new one. I don't know, but I rather liked her. (AND I remember her name. It's Connie. Yay, me!) I think she is someone I can talk to. The trick will be whether I become comfortable enough with the rest of the group to talk to them.

So, what did I learn in group therapy? I learned about cognitive distortions or assumptions. What are cognitive distortions or assumptions? Well, they're tricks our brains play on us to make us feel like crap.  Here's a list of the ones we talked about:

·          All or Nothing Thinking

·          Over-Generalizing

·          Mental Filtering

·          Disqualifying the Positive

·          Mind Reading

·          Fortune Telling

·          Catastrophizing

·          Magnifying or Minimizing

·          Emotional Reasoning

·          "Shoulds"

·          Labeling/Mislabeling

·          Personalization

·          Maladaptive Thought

·          Compensatory Misconceptions

She gave us general overviews of each of these distorion, and I've realized that several of them apply to me. I won't go into each one right now, or even talk about the ones that apply to me. Instead, I'll do some private research on each of them and post about them later. Otherwise, this post would be the length of a magazine article instead of a blog post. Besides, the information I was given in group was really very basic, and I'd like make sure that I understand the distortions before I explain them to you. Something to look forward to. Hmmm?

We also talked about being emotionally "tipped-over" and how to bring yourself upright again. What is being emotionally tipped-over? Well, we human beings use both reason and emotion to evaluate situations and make decisions. Being emotionally tipped means that the emotion side of our brain has taken over. For example, excessive crying, irrational anger, that kind of thing. The reason side of our brain has taken a back seat, so to bring the balance back, we need to switch from emotional thinking to reasonable thinking by focusing on a task that the reasonable mind usually takes care of, like counting. Remember when your mom told you to count to 10 when you're angry? Well this is why. Apparently, you can't think emotionally while you're counting. Of course, stopping at 10 may not work. Connie advised to just count until you feel better. This is just one example, and may not work for all people and/or all emotions. There are lots of reasonable thought processes that you can use, though.  Things like grounding yourself by focusing on sensory input: sounds, smells, sights, and textures or even, wait for it...writing. (Hey, now! How about that? I'm workin' the reasonable thought processes. Go me!)

Next we talked about anger and sadness being based on feelings of helplessness. Sounds legit to me. When do we usually get depressed? When things happen that are beyond our control: death, divorce, children leaving the house, loss of a job, illness, etc. How do we feel when these kinds of things happen? We feel like we have no control over them. We feel helpless. People with depression and anxiety tend to focus on that helpless feeling and compound it by thinking that we will always feel that way, or that we deserve to feel that way. (I do that.) Connie told us all to create a list, a gratitude list, of things we feel are positive about us.  Here's mine:

I truly love my family.

I learn new things quickly.

Yeah, that's as far as I got before I started to come up with things that had qualifiers. You know, things like "I have a good singing voice, but not as good as it used to be" or "my friends tell me I'm a really nice person." This is a really hard list to create, but I'm going to set a goal for myself to come up with 10 nice/good things about me that don't contain qualifiers for next week. You can do it with me if you like.